MSN Spaces takes blog censorship to a new level

MSN Spaces has been criticized for censoring its Chinese blogs in the past, …

Dictionary.com defines the term "blog" as "an online diary; a personal chronological log of thoughts published on a Web page." Over the past few years, blogging has become rather popular with just about everyone. It's a great place to share thoughts, not to mention photos and other digitized content. Zhao Jink, AKA Michael Anti, found that MSN Spaces is not such a great place to blog. Why? MSN Spaces censors its Chinese content.

CNN analyst turned blogger Rebecca MacKinnon recently wrote a post on her blog about how MSN Spaces has been censoring Chinese blogs that contain content that may be considered taboo in the country. In the case of Michael Anti, Michael Anti is a provocative blogger who has a tendency to speak out against the Chinese government. In particular, Anti blogged about the Beijing Daily News journalists who left their jobs after the top editors of the periodical were fired for their more controversial coverage. Anti's blog was taken down from MSN Spaces, leaving readers with a "space not available" message.

In the final days of December, Anti became a vocal supporter of journalists at the Beijing Daily News who walked off the job after the top editors were fired for their increasingly daring investigative coverage, including some recent reporting on the recent police shootings of village protestors in the Southern China.

Was Anti's blog deletion an isolated incident? According to MacKinnon, the same thing happened to her after trying out a few controversial terms in her blog headliners.

On December 16th I created a blog and attempted to make various posts with politically sensitive words. When I attempted to post entries with titles like “Tibet Independence” or “Falun Gong” (a banned religious group), I got an error message saying: “This item includes forbidden language. Please delete forbidden language from this item.”

After trying out 5 other blog-hosting services besides MSN Spaces, MacKinnon found that each one also censored Chinese content that was on the political edge. According to Roland Soong of EastSouthWestNorth blog, many of these censorships are due to the political upperhand of Bokee, which is one of China's larger blogging companies. Since Anti has started keeping a blog at MSN Spaces, Bokee has been nothing but critical of the site.

Microsoft is not the only company partaking in the Chinese censorship gala. Ars reported a few weeks ago that the EU commissioner was not pleased to find that Google and Yahoo were also censoring content for the Chinese government. At that time, Microsoft was only censoring certain words in blogs, but now the company has taken to removing the entire journal. Is Microsoft taking censorship too far by removing the entire blog? The company can do whatever it pleases with its content, but will its blog censorship drive users away?